Michael Banh from Oregon and Cici Brown - friend of Michael's from tumblr... for three years. They had never met. AWWW.

Japan! The next fan is obviously from the japen - but first Jim Michael's talks about the importance of the international audience for SPN.

Yasuko Shiomi is the Japanese fan. She made her own action figures when she couldn't find any. I have some friends who have done that too - I'm always amazed. She even made them different faces that you could interchange for different expressions.

Oh, then she made little videos - I've never seen these before. They're great!

She brought her friend Shoko Watanabe. They became friends over twitter.

Jim explains how they set up the contest to make sure they got actual fans.

This is a really cute feature so far.

Susan Milne - is an assistant to Jim Michaels is the woman form set on this featurette... they finally introduce her.

They show them all the departments how how they all fit together to produce the show. (I kind of wish all fans could have that tour.)

Yasuko got to try on Sam's stunt-double's wig.

Super adorable featurette.

Phil Sgriccia was the director.

Mark Sheppard Sheppard talked to them.

Props. COSTUMES!! Sam's ugliest shirt features in one shot!

Yasuko showed Jerry Wanek her little creations. He's a sweetheart.

They have 8 impalas, 3 Heros, 3 stunt, and 2 parts cars.

Jeff Bodernick built the Impala - car building is his hobby.

I love Michael, he cries whenever he sits in anything relating to Supernatural. Aww, so did Shoko. I love these people.

They met the cast and everything. It's cute.

They went on a personal locations tour with Russ too.

Anyway, "cute" sums that one up.

The Winchester Mythology: Shedding Light on the Darkness

This is the usual overview of the mythlogy. So, it's a lot of reiterating and flashbacks to explanations - with interviews of people behind the scenes.

Epic bibilical - but as a personal story between siblings.

Brad Buckner talks about the Greek pantheon and how they changed the Christian mythology to have the similar feeling of your god being fallible.

Dabb talks about how Dean's attraction to the darkness was hinged on the fact that if he DID join with her, he wouldn't be in pain anymore. (I think they could have leaned on that more, rather than just making it a weird thing.)

Jensen talks more about the non-con aspect of it. (Jensen's a smart cookie.)

They talk about how Amara has to learn about humanity first, because when she was locked away they didn't exist.

They talk about how once they introduce Amara as God's sister, they had to have God come back. Though Buckner says that no one knew they were going to do that from the beginning - it just unfolded that way as the season went and they realized they had to bring him in. (I kind of wish they'd plan better than that, but whatever.)

Emily Swallow talks about how Amara, at first, doesn't really think she's hurting anything important. She believes that nothingness is bliss, so she's helping end suffering.

Jared talks about how Sam and Dean have come to a point where they HAVE to respect each other's decisions, because they've learned that when they don't, bad things happen.

Misha talks about how "we can't actually conquer the ulitmate evil, because it's part of the fabric of this universe."

Emily talks about how Amara puts aside her pride in the end and let's the creation stay.

Dabb talks about the collaboration between the writers as being super important to close off.

*shrug* - that's my review on that one.

Digital Magic: Enhancing the Sets with VFX

Robert Singer talks about the differing looks of Hell. Then Crowley's 'mundane office building' and then the secondary cage for Lucifer.

Jerry Wanek talks about the visual style of the set - gothic, and infinity.

Mark Meloche talks about how they made hell "void" as much as possible.

The floor of hell was inspired by Hawaii's lava flows... (there we go, Supernatural in hawaii).

Then they talk about the submarine, which is pretty cool.

Then they all praise each other with how amazing all their stuff is. (That sounds really bad, but seriously, they don't have that big a budget people.)

That one was fun and short.

GAG REEL - always a treat.

Then the Supernatural: 2015 Comic-Con Panel... which I didn't bother to watch, because that's old news. Though, I wish they had that feature back in the early days - my favourite Comic-Con moment to date will forever be Jared mishearing the word "horror" sometime around S2 or S3.

So, not much to say about the features this year. There weren't any real incite that I wanted to talk about... well, maybe just one...

In the mythology one, they talked about how Amara-God storyline boiled down to a sibling relationship... and they talked about it like it was supposed to relate to Sam and Dean's relationship. I think, ultimately, that's where they failed a bit this year - because Sam and Dean are in a super healthy place (finally) so, there wasn't any paralleling going on. Ultimately, the Winchesters would have felt more involved if there WERE, even if it was in contrast. As it stands though, it feels more like there was no exploration of the Winchesters this season, even though there was a LOT of fodder for it at the end of last season. I talked a bit about this in the comments to the 11x22, but basically there was a TON of emotional crap brought up between them in 10x23, that just never gets addressed at all. Is Dean still down on them and thinking they're monsters? How is Sam coping with unleashing the darkness by saving Dean? How does that affect their dynamic given that this was actually the first time Sam DID manage to save Dean (while his past failures at doing so are what led him to ignore the consequence.)

There was a lot of stuff they could have explored in the sibling dynamic, and they could have even done it from a HEALTHY place rather than one full of strife - but instead I feel like they took "Sam and Dean aren't fighting" to mean "Sam and Dean don't have anything to talk about." When that's just not true.

So, that's the DVDs all wrapped up. Yay!

S11 was really good overall, I think. Much stronger than S10. 11x01-11x20 were really what I consider the season, 11x21-11x23, really belong more in the S12 pile, in my opinion...especially 11x23. But we'll discuss that more next year (or in the fall, I guess) when I inevitably rewatch S12. I might switch up the rewatches a bit though and try to do them in a fashion where they take less time. We'll see. It might mean going back to my rewatch S1-S3 format, where I watched the episode straight and then wrote a post afterward, instead of transcribing dialogue and writing the post as I go.

We'll see. I kind of did a rougher version of the quote system back in the day. Right now, I take the time to make sure that I have the quote down EXACTLY the way it is in the show - which means that part of my time watching is transcribing.

SuperWiki already HAS transcriptions (albeit done by other people, so I can't guarantee how accurate they are), so it could be that I just work out a system where I don't double that work. And just take short hand notes about what I want to talk about when I watch, and then write up the post afterwards.

We'll see though... I'd just prefer to get the rewatches done earlier in the year like I used to be able to (when I could somehow do 2-3 of them in a week, instead of just 1.)

Good points about how the brothers' dynamic has changed this season and all they've left unsaid. It's as if Season 11 didn't happen. I wish we had more conversations between the brothers about a lot of things, but I guess we'll just have to fill in the blanks for ourselves.